'Call of Duty: Black Ops II' melds gaming, geopolitics

By Mike Snider, USA TODAY

SANTA MONICA, Calif.
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The next installment in the multibillion-dollar Call of Duty franchise has a two-pronged strategy: explore past Cold War covert relations and gaze into the geopolitical crystal ball to foresee how a new Cold War might play out.

Activision/Blizzard

'Call of Duty: Black Ops II' will be released Nov. 13 for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PCs.

'Call of Duty: Black Ops II' will be released Nov. 13 for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PCs.

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Call of Duty: Black Ops II, due Nov. 13 for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PCs, continues the story of Special Forces operator Alex Mason, who helped thwart Soviet plans to attack the USA in the late '60s in 2010's Black Ops. But the new game takes players to the future, in the shoes of Mason's son, David Mason, who in the year 2025 is assigned to protect the president.

That takes Black Ops into territory usually trod only by the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series, which sets its action in the near future. In the past, the Call of Duty games developed by the studio Treyarch have been set in World War II or the Vietnam era. Publisher Activision alternates Call of Duty releases between Treyarch and Infinity Ward, which along with newcomer Sledgehammer Games created last year's Modern Warfare 3.

Whatever the setting, since 2007's Modern Warfare, each subsequent Call of Duty release has sold more than 11 million copies, and each of the past three years the franchise has set sales records. Modern Warfare 3 topped the $1 billion sales mark in just 16 days.

"No one is going to be able to call this Black Ops 1.5," says Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg . "There's a lot of new stuff in this game. There's a lot of new ideas. We are going for it. We are taking some risks."

The game's teaser trailer, shown Tuesday night on TNT during the NBA playoff broadcast, offered a glimpse of what Mason and the female president find themselves facing — worse trouble than that ever faced by 24's Jack Bauer— including a full-fledged battle that lays waste to Los Angeles.

Other cities including Washington and New York, as well as some in China, are under attack, too, says Treyarch studio head Mark Lamia, who offered an early look at the game to USA TODAY and select other outlets last week in at the studio in Santa Monica.

The game's villain, Raul Menendez, has hacked into the military's fleet of unmanned attack drones and turned them on the USA and its adversary China. "He has a fondness for neither side, and he is able to play them off of each other," he says. "And at this point he is able to use our weapons against us."

Flashbacks to 1980s' Cold War exploits come about when Mason visits his father's past colleague Sgt. Frank Woods, one of the main characters in Black Ops, a Marine who served with Mason's father. "And (Mason) says, 'I am trying to figure out what is going on here with Menendez, and you and my father know this man from a long time ago,' " Lamia says.

Much of Black Ops played out in flashbacks, too. "It's a great way to have a narrative that could move back and forth in time," he says.

Helping game director Dave Anthony flesh out the story and character of Menendez has been David Goyer, screenwriter on The Dark Knight and the upcoming The Dark Knight Rises. Goyer was a consultant on the previous Black Ops game, but this time helped in the story conception.

Collectively, the creative team decided to explore "where is warfare at today because I think not everybody really understands that," Anthony says. "You look at warfare in the past (with) a battlefield where you just have rows and rows of soldiers facing and slaughtering each other. Warfare in the future is completely redefined. To me it was a fascinating opportunity to juxtapose the wars of the past (and) the future."

For insight into futuristic warfare, Treyarch consulted with retired Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North and Wired for War author P.W. Singer. "I have a nightmare scenario that a hacker breaks into our system that controls satellites, UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), even the launch of missiles," says North in the History Channel-style short that Activision also ran on TNT Tuesday prior to the game's teaser trailer. "I don't worry about a guy who wants to hijack a plane. I worry about the guy who wants to hijack all the planes."

Among the issues that Singer, who has worked with the Department of Defense, CIA and FBI, hashed out with Treyarch: brewing tensions between the USA and China, increased reliance on rare-earth elements used in electronics and the rise in robots used by the military. "It is that combination of trying to be grounded in reality, but also remembering that this is all about entertainment and having something that is going to be as cool as hell," he says.

Awaiting players are combat sequences on horses in Afghanistan and futuristic weapons such as machine-gun-armed helicopter drones and stegosaurus-shaped mech combat robots.

In the L.A. battle, choppers providing cover for the presidential detail are shot down to careen on the freeway ahead of the convoy. Overpasses and skyscrapers are brought down by the bombing. "It is an insane level of detail that is going on," Lamia says. "We are able to put together the biggest scenes I can even imagine at this point."

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